In this age of cultural diversity, we like labels.
I’m an African-American. He’s a Latino. I work with an Asian-American. I know a Native American. I live next door to a feminist. I see a lot of white males.
White males?
Since at least the last election, there has been much talk about white males as a distinct cultural species, especially the fabled “angry white male.”
Which raises an obvious question: Can an aggregation as diffuse and varied as white men possibly share a culture?
Critics say no, that this is carrying our fondness for labeling too far.
Professionals in cultural-sensitivity training, however, find the concept of a “white male culture” useful, especially for white men who have been slow to understand that not everyone is like they are. When white men acknowledge their own distinctiveness, the consultants say, they begin to appreciate the distinctiveness of other groups.
But first, voices of doubt about “white male culture.”
Ellis Cose, a Newsweek contributing editor whose book “A Man’s World: How Real Is Male Privilege — and How High the Price” explores common ideas about “male privilege” and explodes many of them, is among those who find the idea ludicrous.
“There are a lot of women, blacks, Latinos and others who believe there is an Anglo, male-class way of doing things,” said Cose, who is black. “I think this is far too simplistic. And if we try to do this, we end up with silliness.”
Cose noted that we could end up blaming white men in general for employee grievances just because white men run companies. Or identify them all as warmongers because so many sit atop the military hierarchy.
“We tend to generalize to the nth degree,” Cose said. “But there are a lot of differences between white males.”
Chuck Lawrence, a Seattle University sociology professor, doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a white male culture either. White men don’t share the common experiences and environment that help define a culture.
But white males, he notes, do share the experience of living in a world that seems overwhelmingly to reflect them.
“They look at television and it reflects them. Whether bad guys or good guys, it’s them,” said Lawrence, who is white. The faces, traits and attitudes they see on TV mirror what they’re familiar with, he said.
From there it’s an easy step to thinking that everyone else is pretty much like them.
That pervasiveness is at the very heart of white male culture and part of the reason we have trouble seeing it for what it is, said Chuck Shelton and Stephen Guy, two white men whose business is human relations and diversity training for employers.
“It is a culture that those in it often have a hard time even recognizing,” Guy said. “Although they define mainstream culture, they’re not aware of it. They’re like fish in water: They don’t know they’re wet.”
Until they understand they’re “wet” — in other words, distinctive — they can’t appreciate the sense of being different from non-whites commonly feel in our society, Shelton and Guy said.
So Shelton and Guy have taken a novel approach in their cultural-sensitivity training: They first try to educate the predominantly white male groups about themselves.
In a study of a large company by her consulting firm, Anna Duran found that 98 percent of the white males surveyed had never had the experience of feeling unique. Those who had experienced it indicated it came when their daughters took them to gatherings of their adolescent friends.
“Until the white male goes out and places himself in other circumstances, it never occurs to them that they are different,” said Duran, of Anna Duran & Associates, which does diversity training. “They haven’t had the structure or framework to understand differences. It’s like having hangers in a closet. You need the hangers to hang something on.”
People in the diversity field say there is more to this than white men’s failing to recognize that not everyone is like them. They also fail to acknowledge what they share with one another, membership in a cultural group.
Jean Mavrelis, of Jean Mavrelis & Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in exploring gender and culture issues for corporations, says white men lack a sense of interconnections that would encourage them to understand themselves as part of a group.
“One piece I see white men missing is the ecology of how everything is connected to everything,” she said.
Thomas Kochman, another consultant in race, gender and culture issues, who is white, agreed that white males tend to see themselves as individuals rather than as members of a group.
“We don’t see ourselves as a group unless we’re on the defensive, or there’s a circle drawn around” us, he said.
White males, he noted, believe they are responsible only for themselves. So they don’t see themselves as their brother’s keeper, Kochman said.
“So it’s OK for President Nixon’s brother to be on welfare. There’s no other group like that,” he said.
This disinclination to see themselves in terms of group has two consequences, Kochman said: It desensitizes white males to group identities that others share, and it keeps them from easily forming the kind of group bonds common among blacks, Latinos and others.
“White men won’t feel consoled if they have 47 percent of jobs,” Kochman said. “They don’t worry if another white male doesn’t get a job. What they say is: `What about me?’ “
A big difference between white males and other groups is the way they react to organizational structures such as businesses, Duran said. Although white men may run business organization, it doesn’t necessarily mean the organizational structure reflects the way white males think or do things. But the organization incorporates a business culture white males tend to accept.
“White men are willing to suck it up,” she said. They have learned to get along by going along — not necessarily to the benefit of either themselves or their organization, she said.
“What we’ve found is that a lot of white men aren’t performing at maximum . . . because the organization doesn’t reflect their values,” Duran said.
She recalled a corporate training class filled primarily with white male engineers and scientists in which one white male felt the need to defend white men as a group.
He relentlessly challenged Duran until the class looked more closely at personal values. He found that he liked to go from project to project for the thrill of it while his colleagues liked achieving results. And he was oriented toward the past while his co-workers looked ahead.
And suddenly the man stood up during the training session and declared: “By God, I’m not a white male! That’s why I’m having difficulty with you guys.”
Human-relations consultants say white men can get better at this kind of sensitivity. Indeed, they’d better get better.
By the year 2020, it is expected that people of color will make up the majority of people in the workforce.
“White men will have to learn social-relationship skills,” Kochman said. “Blacks, Hispanics, women have this training by cultural training.”
In doing so, white males need to understand certain perceptions attributed to them by others: that they are dominating, individualistic, analytical rather than emotional, relationally restrained, privileged, and task-oriented rather than people-oriented.
Of course, Cose said, there’s a danger this may only be good, old-fashioned stereotyping, directed for a change at white men.
“In a funny sort of way, it’s payback,” he said. “What white America has done is look at minorities in certain way. Black men are lazy. Black men are violent. Black women are promiscuous. And they saw equally denigrating stereotypes of Latinos and Asians.”
Typecasting white males may be a defensive reaction by minorities and women, Cose said. “If they tag us with stereotypes, let’s look at them.”
To deal with this kind of typecasting, white men — and everyone else — could start by looking at themselves, Guy said. “The first aspect is acknowledging frustrations, debunking the myths. Then look in (the) mirror and ask questions about what we see and what others may see. It leads to self-awareness and awareness of others.”
